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Workflows vs. Plugins

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There is so much to learn about Microsoft Dynamics CRM from a development perspective, but for the user the ramp up can be extremely easy.

The key to understanding Microsoft Marketing is to know who they are talking to. Is their audience business users or the development teams?

Arvind's has a good post this week to help kick off discussions around making the decison for using either Plugins or Workflows when adding customizations and extensions to the Microsoft Dynamics CRM v4.0 platform.

When it comes to this topic it is also important for both the business, the customer, the developers and the partner to have an educated discussion. In my years working for a high performance cutting edge solid state storage vendor I learned the following lesson:

Performance is rarely all about hardware or all about software; although many people have very strong opinions on the subject. It is much more about knowing where the bottleneck is, what is causing it and if you remove it where will the next bottleneck appear. Sometimes this requires Infrastructure understanding, sometimes database understanding and sometimes development insight. In fact sometimes it takes all three.

I have attended Oracle Open World and wearing my chatty networking hat I did an informal survey. You can easily have debates and discussions with either the "it is all about the hardware" or "it is all about the database(s) and software" camp. Needless to say education is key.

Alas when it comes to Microsoft Dynamics CRM - the app scales and it scales big, but it also requires mastery, understanding and current active learning. I hate to say it, (as I am also one of these on most apps) but too many technologists, business users, IS professionals and others try to teach themselves applications and the price to develop these scars one by one is high.